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Do You Have a 21st Century Sales Training Strategy?

by Elay Cohen

April 25, 2014

Do You Have a 21st Century Sales Training Strategy?

I’ve sat through a ton of training programs over the course of my career, and an alarming number of them missed the mark completely. I’ve seen teams cooped up in rooms for pricey daylong, even weeklong, sessions that delivered marginal (or no) results. I’m sure you have, too.

These sessions usually failed because they displayed the hallmark traits of old-style training. First, they delivered information via a one-way path: from instructor to student. The instructor is assumed to know things that will benefit the salespeople in the classroom. This is far from the best environment for learning. Second, they jam as much information into the agenda as possible, under the assumption that the more topics they cover in the workshop, the better off the salespeople students will be. But there’s only so much a person can absorb in an hour or even a day. When you’re in an information-overload session, it’s like trying to drink from a fire hose. The trainees lose focus; their eyes wander to the window or their smartphones; they start thinking about how many sales they could’ve made were it not for this blasted mandatory training session. . . .

Thankfully, there’s a better way.

It’s my firm conviction that salespeople learn best when they’re learning from each other, not when they’re stuck in the traditional teacher-student scenario. The trends of video, community, mobile resources, and peer-to-peer mentoring have taken over. Now it’s time to embrace them and apply them to your team. Make every moment a leearning moment. When you scratch the old way of training in favor of a more evolved approach, you’ll see your culture flourish and your team’s productivity sky-rocket. And more importantly, everyone will have more fun. Are you ready?

Read more about this mega trend in the world of sales performance in my book “SalesHood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams To Succeed.” You can buy the book on Amazon.

About the Author

Elay Cohen

Elay Cohen is the author of SalesHood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams to Succeed and the co-founder of SalesHood, a SaaS sales enablement platform and community for sales professionals. Elay is the former Senior Vice President of Sales Productivity at Salesforce. Recognized as the company's "2011 Top Executive", and credited for creating and executing all of Salesforce's sales productivity programs that accelerated its growth from $300M to $3B+ in revenue. The sales training and sales support innovations delivered over these years by Elay and his team to thousands of sales reps resulted in unprecedented hypergrowth. He also created the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) category.